Epistemic Tenure

I think there's another tradeoff here. From High Status and Stupidity: Why? [LW · GW]:

Michael Vassar once suggested: "Status makes people effectively stupid, as it makes it harder for them to update their public positions without feeling that they are losing face."

Giving someone epistemic tenure could make someone more willing to generate and speak "risky" ideas, but could also make them feel that they have even higher status and therefore more face to lose and therefore more "stupid" in various ways. (Aside from Michael's explanation, here's mine [LW(p) · GW(p)]: "once you achieve high status, a part of your mind makes you lose interest in the thing that you achieved high status with in the first place. You might feel obligated to maintain an appearance of interest, and defend your position from time to time, but you no longer feel a burning need to know the truth.")

I think that there's a spectrum between treating someone as a good source of conclusions and treating them as a good source of hypotheses.

I can have thoughts like "Carol looked closely into the topic and came away convinced that Y is true, so for now I'm going to act as if Y is probably true" if I take Carol to be a good source of conclusions.

Whereas if I took Alice to be a good source of hypotheses but not a good source of conclusions, then I would instead have thoughts like "Alice insists that Z is true, so Z seems like something that's worth thinking about more."

Giving someone epistemic tenure as a source of conclusions seems much more costly than giving them epistemic tenure as a source of hypotheses.

This may be anchoring the concept too firmly in the community, but I think there is another benefit to giving obviously-wrong ideas from epistemically-sound people attention: it shows how a given level of epistemic mastery is incomplete.

I feel like given an epistemology vocabulary it would be very easy to say that since Bob has said something wrong and his reasons are wrong we should lower our opinion of Bob's epistemic mastery overall. I also feel like that would be both wrong and useless, because it is not as though rationality consisted of some singular epistemesis score that can be raised or lowered. Instead there is a (incomplete!) battery of skills that go in to rationality and we'd be forsaking an opportunity to advance the art by spending time looking at the how and why of the wrongness.

I think the benefit of epistemic tenure is in high value oops! generation.

This seems like a bad idea to me; I think people who are trying to have good ideas should develop courage instead. If you don't have courage your ideas are being pushed around by fear in general, and asking for a particular source of that fear to be ameliorated will not solve the general problem.

another frame might be Kuhnian momentum.

Something I didn't notice in the comments is how to handle the common situation that Bob is a one-hit wonder. Being a one-hit wonder is pretty difficult; most people are zero-hit wonders. Being a two-hit wonder is even more difficult, and very few people ever create many independent brilliant ideas / works / projects / etc.

Keeping that in mind, it seems like a bad idea to make a precedent of handing out epistemic tenure. Most people are not an ever-flowing font of brilliance and so the case that their one hit is indicative of many more is much less likely than the case that you've already witnessed the best thing they'll do.

Just anecdotally, I can think of many public intellectuals who had one great idea, or bundle of ideas, and now spend most of their time spouting unrelated nonsense. And, troublingly, the only reason people take their nonsense seriously is that there is, at least implicitly, some notion of epistemic tenure attached to them. These people are a tremendous source of "intellectual noise", so to speak, and I think discourse would improve if the Bobs out there had to demonstrate the validity of their ideas from as close to scratch as possible rather than getting an endless free pass.

My biggest hesitation with never handing out intellectual tenure is that might make it harder for super geniuses to work as efficiently. Would von Neumann have accomplished what he did if he had to compete as if he were just another scientist over and over? But I think a lack of intellectual tenure would have to really reduce super genius efficiency for it to make up for all the noise it produces. There's just so many more one-hit wonders than (N>1)-hit wonders.

I apologize for using the phrase "epistemic status" in a way that disagrees with the accepted technical term.

Putting myself in Bob’s shoes I’m pretty sure I would just want people to just be straight with me and give my idea the attention that they feel it deserves. I’m fairly confident this wouldn’t have a knock on effect to my ability to generate ideas. I’m guessing from the post that Scott isn’t sure this would be true of him (or maybe you’re more concerned for others than you would be for yourself?).

I’d be interested to hear other people’s introspections on this.

As you say, Bob's good epistemic reputation should count when he says something that appears wild, especially if he has a track record that endorses him in these cases ("We've thought he was crazy before, but he proved us wrong"). Maybe one should think of Bob as an epistemic 'venture capitalist', making (seemingly) wild epistemic bets which are right more often than chance (and often illuminating even if wrong), even if they aren't right more often than not, and this might be enough to warrant further attention ("well, he's probably wrong about this, but maybe he's onto something").

I'm not sure your suggestion pushes in the right direction in the case where - pricing all of that in - we still think Bob's belief is unreasonable and he is unreasonable for holding it. The right responses in this case by my lights are two-fold.

First, you should dismiss (rather than engage with) Bob's wild belief - as (ex hypothesi) all things considered it should be dismissed.

Second, it should (usually) count against Bob's overall epistemic reputation. After all, whatever it was that meant despite Bob's merits you think he's saying something stupid is likely an indicator of epistemic vice.

This doesn't mean it should be a global black mark to taking Bob seriously ever again. Even the best can err badly, so one should weigh up the whole record. Furthermore, epistemic virtue has a few dimensions, and Bob's weaknesses in something need not mean his strengths in others be sufficient for attention esteem going forward: An archetype I have in mind with 'epistemic venture capitalist' is someone clever, creative, yet cocky and epistemically immodest - has lots of novel ideas, some true, more interesting, but many 'duds' arising from not doing their homework, being hedgehogs with their preferred 'big idea', etc.

I accept, notwithstanding those caveats, this still disincentivizes epistemic venture capitalists like Bob to some degree. Although I only have anecdata, this leans in favour of some sort of trade-off: brilliant thinkers often appear poorly calibrated and indulge in all sorts of foolish beliefs; interviews with superforecasters (e.g.) tend to emphasise things like "don't trust your intuition, be very self sceptical, canvass lots of views, do lots of careful research on a topic before staking out a view". Yet good epistemic progress relies on both - and if they lie on a convex frontier, one wants to have a division of labour.

Although the right balance to strike re. second order norms depends on tricky questions on which sort of work is currently under-supplied, which has higher value on the margin, and the current norms of communal practice (all of which may differ by community), my hunch is 'epistemic tenure' (going beyond what I sketch above) tends disadvantageous.

One is noting the are plausible costs in both directions. 'Tenure'-esque practice could spur on crack pots, have too lax a filter for noise-esque ideas, discourage broadly praiseworthy epistemic norms (cf. virtue of scholarship), and maybe not give Bob-like figures enough guidance so they range too far and unproductively (e.g. I recall one Nobel Laureate mentioning the idea of, "Once you win your Nobel Prize, you should go and try and figure out the hard problem of consciousness" - which seems a terrible idea).

The other is even if there is a trade-off, one still wants to reach the one's frontier on 'calibration/accuracy/whatever'. Scott Sumner seems to be able to combine researching on the inside view alongside judging on the outside view (see). This seems better for Sumner, and the wider intellectual community, than Sumner* who could not do the latter.

I can't tell if you're saying to support Bob's bad idea and to (falsely) encourage him that it's actually a good idea. I don't agree, if so. If you're just saying "continue supporting his previous good ideas, and evaluate his future ideas fairly, knowing that he's previously had both good and bad ones", then I agree. But I don't think it's particularly controversial or novel.

I'm not sure if more or different examples would help. I suspect my model of idea generation and support just doesn't fit here - I don't much care whether an idea is generated/supported by any given Bob. I care a bit about the overall level of support for the idea from many Bob-like people. And I care about the ideas themselves.

Also, almost every Bob has topics they're great at and topics they're ... questionable. I strongly advise identifying the areas in which you don't waste time from some otherwise-great thinkers.

I think your "attentional resources" are just being Counterfactually Mugged here, so if you're okay with that, you ought to be okay with some attention being diverted away from "real" ideas, if you're reasonably confident in your construction of the counterfactual "Bob’s idea might HAVE BEEN good".

This way of looking at it also says that tenure is a bad metaphor: your confidence in the counterfactual being true can change over time.

(If you then insist that this confidence in your counterfactual is also something that affects Bob, which it kinda does, then I'm afraid we're encountering an instance of unfair problem class in the wild and I don't know what to do)

As an aside, this makes me think: What happens when all consumers in the market are willing to get counterfactually mugged? Where I'm not able to return my defected phone because prediction markets said it would have worked? I suppose this is not very different from the concept of force majeure, only systematized.